Acceptance testing – Effective Volto – Testing

Acceptance testing

Acceptance testing#

Volto's acceptance testing (also known as E2E, end-to-end testing) is done using Cypress.

There are a number of fixtures available covering all the configuration use cases. These fixtures have both a specific backend and frontend configuration setup and a related set of tests. The CI infrastructure runs them all automatically on every push to a branch or PR.

The tests can be run in headless mode (same as the CI does), or within the Cypress user interface. The latter is the one that you run under development.

How to run acceptance tests locally (during development)#

When writing new acceptance tests, you usually want to minimize the time it takes to run the tests, while also being able to debug or inspect what's going on.

Being able to restart individual components also comes in handy. It's recommended to start three individual terminal sessions, one each for running the Plone backend, the Volto frontend, and the acceptance tests.

  1. Run the backend fixture.

    make start-test-acceptance-server

  2. Run the frontend fixture.

    make start-test-acceptance-frontend-dev

  3. Run the Cypress tests for that fixture.

    make test-acceptance

Available fixtures:

  • Core (core or not special naming in the test commands)

  • Multilingual (multilingual)

  • Working Copy (workingCopy)

  • Core Sandbox (coresandbox)

There are convenience commands for each of these fixtures. See Makefile for more information.

Writing new acceptance tests#

Go to the cypress/tests folder to see existing tests. There is a directory per fixture. This directory is hot reloaded with your changes as you write the tests. For more information on how to write Cypress tests visit the official Cypress documentation

Helper commands#

There are some artifacts available for the acceptance tests made accessible to Cypress.

Access History, Redux Store and Settings#

We expose the History, Redux Store and Settings from the app (only for Cypress environments) so we can easily access them and execute actions (like navigate using the router), dispatch Redux actions or change app settings "on the fly".

Redux Store#

You can access the Redux store and check for specific states and dispatch actions by:

import { updateIntl } from 'react-intl-redux';
import deLocales from '../../locales/de.json';

const dispatch = action =>
  cy
    .window()
    .its('store')
    .invoke('dispatch', action);

dispatch(
  updateIntl({
    locale: 'de',
    messages: deLocales,
  }),
);

More information about this: https://www.cypress.io/blog/2018/11/14/testing-redux-store/

Volto settings#

You can modify "on the fly" the main Volto settings like this:

cy.settings().then(settings => {
  settings.defaultLanguage = 'de';
  settings.isMultilingual = true;
  settings.supportedLanguages = ['de', 'en'];
});

Cypress component testing#

Cypress allows you also to have component isolated tests (as in per functional tests) but using cypress infrastructure. Volto stil does not uses them, but it might be handy in projects and in core as well.

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